Monthly Archives: January 2015

The last thing I really want to do is write a post about my cat dying. I don’t know what useful things I have to say about that. There isn’t really anything useful to say, is there?

I could wax poetic about the transience of life, of comings and goings, beginnings and ends, but there doesn’t seem to be any poetic justice in that, either. It seems trite to attempt to summarize the love I had for a very silly, fat cat in a blog post. I don’t think I could, even if I wanted to try. So I won’t. At least not today.

Practice makes perfect. … Just kidding, it makes something, but it doesn’t necessarily make anything perfect. Regardless, I do it, almost every day. I enjoy practicing 99% of the time, but I also enjoy practicing a lot more when I’m doing things efficiently and in a manner that’s going to make the best use of my time and brain power. So what enhances my practice sessions?

What I’m about to say may be old news to you. For all I know, it may be old news to 99% of the population. I’m going to say it anyway.

You have to treat every possible opportunity like you already have it.

Whew. Did that. Said that. Are you still with me? If you are not one of the exasperated masses who just rolled their eyes, screamed “duh” at the computer screen (can’t hear you, y’all, so joke’s on you), and clicked the little red circle at the top left of their browser–read on.

I probably don’t need another medium with which to ruin my reputation. But here I am, today, on the ninth day of January 2015, sitting at my desk, writing the first post for my new blog.

New. That’s a word I’ve always liked.

I relish this time of year. Before we get to the good part–the beginning of a new year–we’ve got the weird, nebulous end to the previous calendar year, fraught with over-indulgent reflection and self-flagellation over things that didn’t go as we so meticulously planned last January. We pine over and mourn the projects we left unfinished, the errands we didn’t run, the money we didn’t save.

For me, on January 1st, I seem to forget that there’s a critter in my garage eating my (very expensive) plant food, I’m still eighty pounds heavier than I would like to be (if not more), or that I didn’t quite manage to hit my number of books I wanted to read in 2014.

Come January 1st? All things new. The unknowable–what 2015 is going to bring–doesn’t seem scary just yet. It seems exciting. It seems filled to the brim of potential. In a few months, maybe I’ll remember that anything that has ‘potential’ to be good also has potential to be quite terrible. But today? For now? Just… openness. Just immediacy. Just possibility.

I’ll let y’all in on a not-so-secret: I am extremely long-winded. Even my daily to-do lists are purple prose. When I heard about the concept of choosing “One Little Word” to embody what I wanted 2015 to be, I struggled. Couldn’t it be “one little paragraph”? One little novel? One little treatise?

But I managed to do it. I managed to find the word that lit a fire under my feet when I thought about it, when I spoke it aloud, when I wrote it down and I looked at the letters and how they stood next to each other like little calling cards to the world.

Gumption.

This year, I’m going to live with gumption. I want to go into this year guns blazing–and when I meet an obstacle that scares me and causes me to put my pistols in their holsters, I pray that I have the gumption to draw them again the next day.

I pray that I have the gumption to be as authentically me as possible–no apologies, no addendums, no disclaimers. I pray I have the gumption to celebrate my successes. I pray I have the gumption to learn from my failures. I pray I have the gumption to admit I’m wrong, or that I don’t know, or that I can’t know.

Just.. a whole lot of gumption. And aren’t y’all lucky you get to see how it all turns out?